It all starts with:
When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns.
What does going higher up in abstraction do?
When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all.
Hiring architects
It’s very hard to get them to write code or design programs, because they won’t stop thinking about Architecture. They’re astronauts because they are above the oxygen level, I don’t know how they’re breathing. They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don’t contribute to the bottom line.
Generalizing too much sacrifices the most important feature we wanted in the first place!
Then they’ll build applications like Groove that they think are more general than Napster, but which seem to have neglected that wee little feature that lets you type the name of a song and then listen to it — the feature we wanted in the first place. Talk about missing the point.
Invention for the sake of it
Another common thing Architecture Astronauts like to do is invent some new architecture and claim it solves something. Java, XML, Soap, XmlRpc, Hailstorm, .NET, Jini, oh lord I can’t keep up. And that’s just in the last 12 months!
The empty grandioseness
That’s one sure tip-o to the fact that you’re being assaulted by an Architecture Astronaut: the incredible amount of bombast; the heroic, utopian grandiloquence; the boastfulness; the complete lack of reality. And people buy it! The business press goes wild!
Solving actual problems
Remember that the architecture people are solving problems that they think they can solve, not problems which are useful to solve. Soap + WSDL may be the Hot New Thing, but it doesn’t really let you do anything you couldn’t do before using other technologies — if you had a reason to.